ABSENT

I haven’t written a blog post in a while. The reality is I’ve just felt so overwhelmed by day-to-day life for the past few weeks that I couldn’t formulate something to write about. In three weeks I’ve been off anti-depressants then come back on them, adjusted to my boyfriend landing a new job with hours that aren’t super compatible with mine, battled with insomnia and had to confront some of my anxieties about work. I feel as though I’ve been coasting along for a while and have suddenly been swamped by a wave of anxiety and change and aside from the smaller day-to-day qualms happening in my life, a bigger issue remains: the existance I live now is not going to be the existance I want to live forever.

Confronting the future and navigating a career path seems to be the bain of everyone who uproots to another country in their late teens or early 20’s. The safety net of Mum and Dad doesn’t exist when you live a £600 24 hour flight away from them, there’s no space for respite and so the reality is that life keeps chuggin’ along without a break.

I came to London with the intention of figuring out what to do with my life and to use the city that is full of opportunity and potential to lay the foundations for a really stimulating career. However, I seem to vaselate and flip-flop between ideas ALL THE DAMN TIME. When I first moved here I wanted to be a secondary school teacher and live in London for the rest of my life, now I want to pursue a career in publishing, journalism and literature and move back to Australia. I feel a massive pull toward working in a creative industry and I also feel something drawing me back to the country where I was born. But there are so many factors in the mix that I’m not sure that ANY of my current plans will eventuate.

This all makes me think; maybe the purpose of coming to London was not to figure out what I wanted to do with my life but rather to learn how to move with life. To learn that I can’t plan everything, and that often a vision of the future is not what the reality ends up being….